This is a starter book about building websites with Joomla!—and having fun while doing so. It is not a book for professional developers. The typical user of this book may only ever build a couple of websites—one for business and one for a hobby, and perhaps another for a friend, just to show off! This book will enable you to build 10 simple web projects within hours—without having to pay a developer to do it for you. Therefore, it is not a text book but an activity book with a lot of screen illustrations to make your project fun to build.
This book is not designed to make you an expert Joomla! developer. It will not even bring you close. The objective, however, is to make it possible for almost anyone with just a bit of Joomla! knowledge to build a complex website by mixing the individual projects together. Instant Joomla!!
The hands-on example projects in this book are based on fictitious website development briefs, and they illustrate practical ways of applying Joomla!. A chapter is dedicated to each example website project. Each chapter contains a fictitious brief from which is derived the list of core and contributed extensions that will be required to implement the project. Except for Chapter 1, all of the other chapters are independent of any other chapter in the book and should be taken as a single project module.
In Chapter 1, basic details about installing and configuring Joomla! for use on both local and remote servers are provided. This chapter also contains information about where to obtain essential resources for learning, using, and optimizing Joomla!
In Chapter 2, Buzzy Beez is a small company that intends to put information about their business and products on the Internet. They are looking to build a website that will capture the company's main information for use by clients and customers, so that Buzzy Beez can cut the costs of printing brochures, catalogues, and other essential promotional literature.
In Chapter 3, the Global Hitchhikers Club is an online club for hobos and compulsive travelers. The purpose of the club website is to enable members to keep an online blog of their travels, and to provide a means for advising other club members on their own travels.
In Chapter 4, The Daily Joomer is the only newspaper in Joomlaburg, and it has a local circulation. The intention of this website is to replicate the content of The Daily Joomer online, in a way that will enable the online edition to be easily updated on a real-time basis.
In Chapter 5, "Electric" Skid Jackson is a retired break-dancer and a full-time choreographer and owner of the Def Freeze dance crew. Skid has an idea for a website where all of the street dance events from all over the world can be listed according to their location, so that he can be the first to know what is shaking.
In Chapter 6, Tony Tortilla is a student at Joomlaburg University. Tony thinks that the University's social life can be vastly improved if the University had its own community website where the students can get to know each other a little better.
In Chapter7, Joomgets Inc. is the foremost manufacturer of custom-made widgets in Joomlaburg. Their widgets have won awards internationally and are considered to be vastly superior to other mass-produced widgets, manufactured by so many unscrupulous garage factories. In order to consolidate their success, Joomgets have decided to set up an online e-commerce store to sell their widgets.
In Chapter 8, Wally Fishbourne has the idea to create an online directory where people can post details of accommodation available for rent, share, and sale all over Joomlaburg. He is looking for a simple directory with listing and display features, rather in the style of Gumtree and craigslist.
In Chapter 9, William and Elizabeth Bunter are organizing an online food appreciation community. They intend to enroll members from all over the world to share their food photos on a new website, where users will submit photos of their food for all other members to admire and rate.
In Chapter 10, Winston Groovy returned home to his wife, Rita, in Kingston, Jamaica after being missing for two days, claiming to have been abducted by aliens. So Rita Groovy has decided to create a website to aggregate occurrences of alien sightings all over the world, in order to save other people the heartache of having their loved ones permanently lost to extra-terrestrial kidnappers.
In Chapter 11, bad news is always good news for the press. Vaughan Pyre has decided to take advantage of this and create a website that will aggregate bad news and weird happenings from all over the world. The content of the site will be entirely derived from RSS feeds from several sources, with each feed being automatically retrieved and its items displayed on the website.
In the Appendix to this book, you will find a list of modules and themes used in this book as well as links to their project pages.
All of the projects in this book are based on Joomla! 1.5. A list of the contributed extensions employed, and links to their project pages, is provided in the Appendix.
This book is for anyone who wants to build a Joomla! site for business or for pleasure, and also for those who want to see how to apply the many available Joomla! core features and extensions in different scenarios. If you are looking to develop a professional quality website by using the Joomla! Framework, this is a great book to help you get started.
However, this book is not a "dummies" book, and users are advised to familiarize themselves with basic Joomla! terminology and operations, such as creating content, and uploading and enabling templates and extensions. Some installation and configuration details are provided in Chapter 1, and users are also encouraged to visit the Joomla! project site (http://www.joomla.org/) where ample help exists in the form of both documentation and a very active users' forum. Some other sources of Joomla! help are also listed in Chapter 1.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "To create these new categories, click on the Categories button in the Control Panel."
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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